Using an Office365/Exchange Online "Shared" Mailbox with Spiceworks Helpdesk

Introduction

NOTE: While this how-to is written with Office365/Exchange Online in mind the basic premise should be applicable to many other hosted email scenarios. If there is some demand I may try and create a more generic version.

So you’re using Office365/Exchange Online and want to use the email functionality of the Spiceworks Helpdesk but hate to pay that extra monthly charge for a simple inbox. You could of course make an address with gmail/hotmail/yahoo or the like, and I think many have. But if you're like me, it just irks you to have that one address that is off the company domain and it’s kind of asking for some small confusion anyway. Office365 has a free mailbox, type “Shared”, but you can’t log into it directly like Helpdesk needs to. So what do you do? You hack around it. ;)

Now I will be describing this in the context of two different top level domains because I think it reads more clearly, however, the same procedure applied to your normal domain and a sub-domain should still work, just set the MX for your top level domain and sub-domain separately.

So in our two domain example we have:
Domain ABC.com: Primary domain, MX records pointing to Office365 servers.
Domain DEF.com: Secondary domain, MX set for itself/handles mail it receives internally. I used a linux server with CPanel, mileage on other configurations may vary but this is pretty straight forward.

Configure Spiceworks

Then fill in the login information with the info for your support@DEF.com mailbox on the webserver.

5

Update SPF (Optional)

If you have SPF configured for ABC.com, make sure DEF.com's IP is covered by the record. If your version of DEF.com is, one way or the other, on the same server as ABC.com then you are likely already covered.

Conclusion

Ok, so what do we have here? In short, people send mail to support@ABC.com, the mail goes to the Office365 server and is then bounced back out to the DEF.com server and its free support@DEF.com mailbox, Spiceworks picks up on this copy and acts accordingly to it and any other new incoming emails. Then, when it sends, it uses the support@DEF.com mailbox/service but lists the email as coming from support@ABC.com, making it all appear nice and clean to any user; no one will ever know this address is special from the others.
So people see the mail as still coming from the main domain like we want and we get the free storage with direct access for the ticket system that we wanted with no extra monthly charge.